Computer-based social networks such as FACEBOOK, GOOGLE+, PING, or LINKEDIN provide opportunities for individuals to maintain, nurture, and develop relationships with friends or business contacts. These networks typically enable their participants to view profiles of other participants, and to link with other participants with whom a pre-existing actual relationship exists or with whom an actual social or business relationship is desired. Typically, once linked together through a computer-based social network, participants can exchange communications, photographs, or other media content, and can view the identities of persons with whom the other participant has relationships through the social relationship network. The other participant might have strong relationships with some of these persons, and might barely know others.
It is known, in contexts other than computer-based social networks, to provide, to a human player of a computer-based game, information characterizing the attitudes of other non-human “players” toward the human player. The information can include a linguistic description of the other player's attitude toward the human player (friendly, annoyed, etc.) and a set of reasons underlying the other player's attitude. The human player can also look up a simple description of the relationships between the other players.
In the modern context of computer-based social networks, however, it is typically assumed that the participants are themselves aware of the nature of their own relationships with other actual human participants.
In a social network such as FACEBOOK, a profile of a particular person can identify another person to whom the person is married or engaged, etc., along with an anniversary date.
The calculation of link quality metrics in social networks is known in the art. For example, Eberle, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/743,866 (Publication No. 2008/0120411) discloses a method for producing a quantitative “scores” of the quality of relationships between the participants of a social network, based on variety of factors.